Sight Unseen

This president: I have at times been asked why I do not mention the American president by name in these jottings. My reply can be found in the words of former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who when speaking of the 2019 mass murders in Christchurch pointedly refused to speak the name of the alleged assailant in public. She would not give him the privilege of having his name uttered, since a name is of itself an affirmation of a kind. Hers was a rare and noble approach. I, in turn, do not speak the name of this man, this president, this monarch, this vigilante, this strongman, this misunderstood patriot — pick your poison — because I find him very literally unmentionable in the Jacinda Ardern vein. I wish to confer no legitimacy. It is my very personal way of imposing needed ostracism. And I will not relent.

Boiled frog: The Iran war has backed Italy into a schizophrenic corner. The country it has long revered no longer looks or behaves like its old self, leaving both admirers and critics stunned before what they consider an epochal shift. The far-right ruling coalition naturally sides with Washington, but opposition parties are far more skeptical. No one here or anywhere else has much fondness for Iran’s Islamic regime, yet some do question America’s heavy-handed tactics. Others abhor Israel’s role as America’s attack dog (a remnant of longstanding antisemitism). In general, Italians ardently dislike wars. They had little patience for America’s protracted conflict in Iraq, an era that saw tens of thousands of rainbow-colored peace flags ubiquitously hung from apartment windows throughout the country. Many were the anti-war street demonstrations, and Iran has brought a new wave of them. Fallout from America’s lengthy Iraq presence as well as the global financial debacle of 2007 helped push Italy from the center-right to the center-left, albeit briefly. Something of this sort may occur in 2027 when the country will hold general elections — a leftward turn now seemingly more possible following the heavy defeat of a government-sponsored referendum that would’ve given political parties greater control over the judiciary. For now, all remains muddled. In effect, Italians are taking stock not only of their country but also of a transformed America whose values it long saw as immutable. In 1977, I interviewed poet and Nobel laureate Eugenio Montale. At the time, Leftist terrorism haunted Italy. What, I asked him, might the future hold. He answered as only a poet could. Maybe a stew of fine meats, he replied, then paused, or maybe a giant frog no one knows whether to eat or to run from. So it is that nervous Italy awaits what the cook has to offer.

The head of BlackRock, America’s behemoth investment firm, has remarked that a mere cessation of hostilities in Iran will not bring the Middle East crisis to heel, at least not from the view point of those who manage trillions of dollars in investment capital. For the ultra-rich, whether the wealth is concentrated in individuals, corporations, or nations, only the disarming and termination of the Iranian regime will relieve regional tension and end oil revenue losses. Otherwise, global recession looms. Since money makes policy, often to the exclusion of all else, the BlackRock message is clear, and it is a message both Washington and Jerusalem understand and appreciate. It perfectly suits this president’s favorite word, obliterate, and is likely to mean he will spare no effort, even the introduction of U.S. ground troops, to ensure BlackRock movers and shakers get their way. What during the Cold War was labeled imperialism and adventurism is now a kind of belligerent asset management. It is the globalization of rule by the one percent, the new dogma of a century so greedy that it knows to make sense of life only through overs, unders, and bottom lines. Some allege, the White House has been leaking information about its Iran maneuvers to permit stock market speculation and insider trading among its friends, an astonishing and treasonous charge if true. Call all this tyranny by portfolio, a dystopia in its own right.

Inferno: It was four years ago that a Scandinavian politician mournfully suggested Europe was again ripe for war. After all, eighty years had passed since the end of the last world war, and peace, he suggested, was nearing the end of its rope. How right he was. Now, with the United Nations also at the end of its rope, seven nations are at war: the United States, Israel, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Russia, and Ukraine, not to mention the recent skirmish between Thailand and Cambodia and civil wars raging in Sudan and Somalia. This does not include spiteful trade tension. All that keeps the world from conflagration is that the U.S., most European states, and China view the chaos in the abstract. But the situation is infinitely delicate. If the Middle East conflict grows more dire, if Russia challenges the Baltics, or if India becomes caught up in Pakistan’s fight, a pre–World War I scenario will come into focus. Leaving combat aside, the world — minus today’s sports-obsessed America — has not seemed so stricken with worry about the future since the mid-1950s, when all feared an impending nuclear holocaust. What is regrettable is that the American president is at least in part responsible for accelerating the chaos, his supporters inserting evangelical zeal into the equation. In a word, all this is Jesus’ will. If so, we are, more than ever, children of a lesser Christ.

True Lies: Disinformation and blatant political tampering, pre-dictatorial in texture, have come to define these times. Israel, for many decades among the world’s toughest but fairest countries, has slid into the darkest corner of reactionary thinking. It speaks of decimating the “murderous” Iranian regime while making no mention of its own bloodletting in attempting to create a Greater Israel from Gaza and the West Bank, a Jewish political project dear to Benjamin Netanyahu’s proudly extremist government. In Italy, whose Giorgia Meloni is no more than a charming version of Marine Le Pen, voters are being asked to support a referendum that would give political parties sweeping control over the judiciary, another far-right nirvana. Why all this now? Because the American ruler has set a shiny new example, irony intended, and many wish to strike while the iron is hot. For those who missed the insidious rise of Fascism and Nazism, here’s a latter-day primer.

Trickery: The Iran war continues to supply paradox, contradiction, hypocrisy, and deceit, as if its western players refuse, like adamant children, to accept how combat works. A case in point is Britain’s angry accusation that Iran was unfairly “lashing out” after it fired long-range ballistic missiles at Diego Garcia, an Indian Ocean island with British and American bases. So far, so good. But wait. The attack, a failure, came a day after Britain formally gave the United States permission to launch combat missions against Iran. That is what Tehran responded to, and in terms of warfare, it was entirely justifiable. But in this conflict, double standards and trickery are the norm. The American ruler sends jets to rebomb a nuclear plant he claims was “obliterated” in raids last June. One day he suggests he might deploy U.S. ground troops to secure the Strait of Hormuz, the next he shrugs that off by saying “we don’t use it,” clearly inviting Europe, which depends on the strategic seaway, to protect its own interests — a backhanded way of getting it to enter the conflict. If this war is indeed a video game, it is badly in need of those better able to program it, preferably one or two schooled in the outbreak of World War I.

Nuts!: The American president is furious that his European allies have failed to deploy their own warships in support of his Arabian Sea flotilla. This from a leader who has for more than a year been berating both the European Union and NATO. A president with designs on Greenland as well as a new cozy rapport with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Europe’s sworn enemy. Before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Colin Powell, the critical actors in this drama, worked for months with Europe, NATO, and the United Nations to achieve a pro-war consensus. Most eventually agreed to back Washington, though with reservations. Now a president who does as he wishes, dodging his own Congress, wants Europe to cheerlead him. Europe should do no such thing. It should behave as American Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe did during the Battle of the Bulge in the waning stages of World War II. His troops surrounded, he was served with a note from a German commander demanding he immediately surrender, to which he famously replied with a single word: “Nuts!”

On War #3: Persians are not Arabs. Just ask Cyrus the Great, whose pre-Christian empire stretched to the Mediterranean. The misconception makes a mockery of complaints by Saudi Arabia and the Emirates (by now American sycophants) that Iran is behaving unfairly by targeting their lands and closing the vital oil corridor known as the Strait of Hormuz. Any Arab with a sense of history could have seen this coming. The Islamic regime existed for 50 years until the United States and Israel entered into an illegal and unprovoked war, though the concept of international legality is by now long-gone. For that same half-century, post-Revolution Iran made it no secret that it disliked the presence of American bases so near its soil, something a Saudi Arab named Osama bin Laden also detested and created Al Qaeda as a response. The bad blood in the region is notorious and noxious, something a trigger-happy American ruler and his Israeli ally should have taken into account before kicking up a maelstrom that will take decades to repair.

America’s new troika of priorities — isolationism, protectionism, and militarism — will, I believe, produce unsettling consequences. Here are some that come to mind, oversimplified in the extreme: 1. The United Nations, admonished recently by the U.S. State Department to “adjust, shrink, or die,” will in fact die, unable to muster needed funds. The Cold War is dead, and unilateralism is inimical to global diplomacy. UNICEF, UNHCR, and UNESCO are all likely to perish, private agencies doing the possible in their absence. Perhaps the Trump family will acquire the elegant U.N. Headquarters and transform it into a luxury hotel. 2. Though the European Union may survive in name, major states such as France and Germany will rearm, the latter in time becoming a nuclear power. European tension will eventually lead to internecine threats, all the more so as far-right, nationalist parties grow in stature and sway. This, ironically, is what NATO was in part created to prevent, but with Russia intensifying its ambitions, Europe will further burnish creaky muscles. 3. Russia will in the end make uneasy peace with Ukraine, but not before Washington has compelled it to relinquish sovereign territory as both Europe’s NATO contingent and Britain are shoved to the sidelines. 4. China will seize Taiwan sooner rather than later, and the United States will almost certainly order Beijing to cease and desist. But such demands will go nowhere because the U.S., witness Iran, Venezuela, Greenland, and Cuba in the wings, has lost all moral authority. Ultimately, the U.S. will not deter China, nor limit its growing Pacific Rim potency. 5. In the next British general election, Nigel Farage’s vehemently xenophobic Reform UK party will outstrip expectations, forcing a coalition government to adopt stricter anti-migration policies and perhaps even turn to deportation. 6. Barring an unlikely peace agreement, the United States and Israel will win the Iran War and usher in a Washington-friendly government of national reconstruction that will rely heavily on American imports. These are educated guesses based above all on intuition. As the hackneyed bromide goes, only time will tell.

On War #2: More than 150 years have passed since the United States fought a war on its own soil and fully faced its destructive savagery. That of course was the Civil War, which pitted Americans against Americans. Since then, it has been involved in half-a-dozen major conflicts, but none lapped over onto U.S. territory. There were hideous surprise attacks, one at Pearl Harbor and the second in New York City and Washington. Both lasted only hours, though the death tolls were high. Otherwise, the hundreds of thousands of American casualties came “over there.” Americans as a result have no notion of what domestic combat is like. They have no bombed-out Detroit or Los Angeles to recollect. No occupying troops have patrolled its landscape. What has happened in Gaza since 2023 and what is happening in Iran now are psychologically unfathomable. Americans care only that they not lose soldiers or aviators, and leaders oblige them by doing their destruction from the air. But there are souls beneath these warplanes, and many, whether they liked or disliked the Islamic regime, will struggle to forget and forgive what is being billed by some as a “liberation.” Parts of Tehran are in flames. People of all stripes are dying. Perhaps one sad day in the future, America will come to understand what it means to be exposed to relentless bombing. For now, however, Iran is merely some godawful place that needed to learn a lesson, as Americans more than 5,000 miles away make their spring plans. All’s fair in love and war, goes the saying. If only that were true.

On War #1: The massive air campaign directed at Iran is a bastard child of postmodern warfare. It is an invasion, not quite. The idea is to so decimate the Islamic regime, which lacks air defenses, that it hoists a white flag. It is what much-decorated American Air Force General Curtis LeMay had in mind when he suggested all that was needed to win the war in Vietnam was to “bomb [North Vietnam] back into the Stone Age.” (In 1968, he would run for vice president with George Wallace.) Bombings of Hanoi did follow, but the North remained steadfast. Moreover, the U.S. already had troops on the ground. That makes the Iran strategy all the more an aberration. If only the U.S. and Israel had armed avatars at their disposal. But we’re not there yet. And stubborn Iran holds on by the skin of its teeth, daring its adversaries to transform a video game into actual combat in which flesh-and-blood soldiers put their lives at risk, a theme I will elaborate on tomorrow.

In the postwar era, countless Hollywood actors have portrayed the American president. A full list would take up pages. Most have endowed the role with commanding authority, wit, severity, and firm-but-fair moral purpose, the latter to rise above partisanship. There were occasional spoofs — Peter Sellers in “Dr. Strangelove” and Jack Nicholson in “Mars Attacks” come to mind — but these were few. My own favorite is Henry Fonda in the 1964 film “Fail Safe,” a Cold War classic. American B-58 bombers have missed a recall signal and will soon detonate an atomic weapon over Moscow. In a spartan White House room, he and his Russian translator, played by Larry Hagman, have the grim task of explaining the situation to the Soviet premier. Fonda is austere, lucid, and devastated but fully in charge. He tells his Russian counterpart that in order to avert an all-out war, he will do to New York City what American planes have erroneously done to Moscow. His reasoned approach seems outside human reach given the circumstances. These days, forced to endure a president who is beyond the scope of caricature and who makes a mockery of American exceptionalism, my mind’s eye often returns wistfully to Fonda. I hope, as my life ebbs, to wake to a Fonda-like figure in the White House, a prospect that for now seems dim.